English football sounds the alarm bell but no-one in Scotland is listening.

One of the maddest things about Scottish football is that it learns absolutely nothing, even when disaster unfolds right in front of it. That is not hyperbole. It is not exaggeration. It is simply the truth. This month has already given us a supreme series of examples.

South of the border, the warnings are now coming in so loudly that only the wilfully deaf can miss them. The BBC piece on the Championship this week ought to have shaken every administrator, every owner and every supporter in Scotland who still thinks debt-fuelled “ambition” is some kind of virtue.

Championship clubs have lost £3bn in the last decade. Since 2006, they have lost £4.3bn. Only three clubs recorded a profit in 2024-25, and one of those only got there because Stoke’s owner wrote off a £90m loan that would otherwise have left them with a £29m loss.

Portsmouth chairman Michael Eisner’s warning could not have been clearer. No club can survive long-term in that system. If it continues, catastrophe will come. Even worse was Kieran Maguire’s line that, if owners stopped subsidising clubs, the vast majority would run out of money within six weeks.

Six weeks. That is not a sport in robust health. That is a house of cards kept upright by wealthy men writing cheques.

And yet here in Scotland, with all our supposed caution, all our smaller budgets, and all our claimed common sense, we keep drifting towards the same model while pretending it is glamour, pretending it is progress, pretending it is “competition.”

That is where Paulina’s piece from earlier this week was so important.

She made the obvious point that too many idiots still refuse to grasp: there is nothing wrong with Celtic having money in the bank. The issue is not the money itself. The issue is what is done with it. A healthy reserve is not cowardice. It is not timidity or a moral failing. It is prudence. Protection. One day it might be the difference between weathering a storm and becoming the next club begging a benefactor to keep the lights on.

But because Scottish football lives in an upside-down moral universe, prudence gets mocked while dependency gets romanticised.

Look at the coverage around Ibrox’s new owners. You would think their money was automatically the club’s money. You would think every pound behind 49ers Enterprises and the other shadowy investors was just sitting there, waiting to be poured into the club.

The clamour for them to spend more is ridiculous. The assumption that they, and whoever the mystery men behind the wider consortium are, will simply carry losses forever is almost universal. But that is fantasy, not analysis.

And the fantasy does not stop there. Across the SPFL there is this growing joy at clubs being bankrolled from abroad, many of them from the United States, or by someone like Tony Bloom. The tone of the coverage is breathless. Look at the ambition. Look at the deep pockets. Embrace the future!

But nobody asks the only question that matters; what happens when the men writing the cheques walk away? When. Not if.

That question should haunt Scottish football, because we already know the answer. We have seen it before. We have lived through it before. And in fact, we have lived through a different version of the same insanity in this country already.

When David Murray ran Rangers and the bank carried those debts, the effect did not stop at Ibrox. His overspending inflated the whole market. Wage bills rose across the league. Clubs started chasing a standard they could not really afford because Rangers had made financial madness look like normality.

If one club spent recklessly and won, others felt pressure to keep up. Some tried to copy the model without having either the wealth or the margin for error to survive it. That is when Scottish football disappeared into one of its most delusional spells.

You had clubs like Dundee signing Claudio Caniggia and Fabrizio Ravanelli from Italy. Dundee, for God’s sake. You had Hibs bringing in Frank Sauzee. You had clubs all over the place behaving as though they lived in a market far richer than the one they actually inhabited. It was vanity spending. And a lot of clubs took years to recover from the madness of it.

Meanwhile Fergus McCann got slated for refusing to risk the financial sustainability he was trying to build at Celtic. Think about that. The one man who actually understood that a club had to survive beyond the sugar rush was the one treated as timid, while the game lost its mind around him.

So, imagine Doncaster gets his wish, expressed last year, that some oligarch buys an SPFL club to give us what he would call a “proper” title race. Imagine that period of insanity all over again.

Wage bills would rise. Transfer fees would rise. Agents would sniff easy money.

Clubs would start stretching themselves to keep up. Some foreign owners would overspend in pursuit of the dream. Others would stop funding their clubs the second the novelty wore off. And the whole thing would hang by a thread.

That is not a theory. It is the history of Scottish football.

That is why Neil Doncaster’s old remark remains one of the dumbest things ever said by a football administrator in this country. In 2012, as the Ibrox Newco issue unfolded, he said: “Phoenix clubs are a perfectly normal part of football.”

No, they are not.

They are not normal in any healthy sense. They are not harmless, nor some charming feature of the landscape.

Phoenix clubs are the wreckage left behind when governance fails, when owners gamble too hard, when debts become unsustainable, and when the game lacks the courage to enforce consequences early enough.

And because Scottish football chose to lie about what happened at Ibrox, because it chose the Survival Lie and then built the Victim Lie on top of it, it never analysed the liquidation properly. It never learned a single lesson from it.

Instead of asking how one of the biggest clubs in the country spent itself into extinction, and what had to change to stop that happening again, the media and the authorities treated it as an awkward PR problem. They wanted the fiction preserved. They wanted the old comfort back as quickly as possible.

And once they did that, they made themselves incapable of seeing the same danger when it reappeared in other forms.

Even before the Ibrox unravelling, Gretna got romanticised. A tiny club with a tiny support. A big benefactor and a rapid rise. European football. And the media lapped it up. Nobody wanted to say it was a one-man vanity project until the one man’s money stopped flowing and the whole thing collapsed.

That is why Hearts can flirt with sugar-daddy ownership after barely surviving Romanov and people still treat it as glamorous. That is why clubs being bankrolled from abroad get sold as ambition rather than dependency.

It is why Frank McAvennie can talk this week about whether Dermot Desmond wants to spend “his” money and make me want to scream. His money? What money? Desmond has never put a penny into Celtic beyond buying shares.

The money in Celtic’s bank account is not Dermot Desmond’s private pocket money. It is club money. It is Celtic’s money. That money comes from revenues, from success, from supporters, from prize money, from ticket sales, from player trading, from everything the institution itself generates.

That is our money he is talking about.

And that distinction matters, because too many people in football talk as though rich men own not just shares but the moral right to decide how much ambition a club is allowed. No. They have influence, yes. They have power, yes. But club money is club money. It exists to protect the institution and to build it.

That is why Paulina was right. The money is not the problem. The problem is what Celtic chooses to do with it. And from a Scottish-football perspective, the broader point is even harsher.

The game mocks Celtic for sustainability. The game romanticises dependency. It lies about liquidation. It cheers on sugar-daddy ownership. The game ignores warnings from England even though the Championship now looks like a financial madhouse rather than a beautiful advert for parity. The game forgets Gretna.

It continues to lie about Rangers and overlook the dangers of American owners, yes, even those with “deep pockets.” The game refuses to learn.

One day, another club will go to the wall. Maybe not tomorrow. Maybe not next month. But if this culture of fantasy and indulgence continues, it will happen again. Inverness nearly disappeared last year. Others are always one owner wobble, one failed gamble, or one funding cutoff away from real trouble.

We clap our hands over our ears. We close our eyes. And the disaster gets closer and closer. That is why this stuff still matters.

This is not a debate between ambition and caution. It is a debate between adults and children. Between people who understand that football clubs must outlive the whims of owners, and people who hear “deep pockets” and start drooling.

It is a debate between those who think collapse should terrify the game, and those who call phoenix clubs “perfectly normal.”

We are one bad Trump breakfast away from a cataclysm in the Middle East. We are one bad earnings quarter at NVIDIA away from seeing the AI bubble burst, taking much of the stock market with it, like a steroid pumped version of the housing crash which brought down banks and for a moment looked like it might take the whole global economy with it. The rainy day is never far away and only a fool forgets it.

Scottish football learned nothing from Ibrox, and until it acknowledges both what happened there and the very real danger a lot of our clubs are still in, it will keep stumbling towards the next wreckage, smiling all the way.

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